AT HOME IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
Luca Molà, ‘Patenting Objects for the House in Renaissance Italy’
Among the thousands of patents for inventions registered by Italian governments during the sixteenth century, many were focused on the production of objects that had to be used or displayed in private houses. Ranging from various types of fabrics or leatherworks for covering the walls to carpets, window panes, glasses, mirrors, ceramics, clocks, lamps, musical instruments, brushes, boxes and fans, the invention of such a wide range of goods demonstrates the attempts of merchants and artisans to diversify their offerings and entice customers to buy an ever-growing amount of new and appealing objects. The most basic structure of the house, too, caught the attention of inventors, who devised and patented advanced types of chimneys, kitchens and air conditioning systems in order to improve living conditions. The appearance of all these novelties mirrored the increasing importance of luxury goods and the domestic environment for the material culture of the Italian elite during the Renaissance.
Alison Brown, ‘The House and Culture of Bartolomeo Scala, Chancellor of Florence from 1465 to 1497’
This paper will address the question of the house as a reflection of the lifestyle of a successful new man. The son of a miller from Colle Val d’Elsa, a provincial town in the Florentine state, Bartolomeo Scala came to Florence in the 1440s and was appointed chancellor, head of the civil service, in Florence in 1465. At that time he was living in rented accommodation and a year later in a house in Via Larga, given to him rent-free by his patrons the Medici. By the early 1470s, however, he was wealthy enough to start building a Renaissance house or palace for himself designed by Giuliano da San Gallo, one of the leading architects of the day.
The house and the extensive garden that surrounds it are interesting in themselves, but in the context of this conference, they are even more so as the setting for the open display of Renaissance humanist culture. For the cortile was decorated with a classical-style frieze illustrating his own autobiographical fables, or apologues, one of which displays his coat of arms with a ladder, symbolic of his own rise from poverty to fame. Here in the 1490s Sophocles’ Electra was performed before a large gathering of literati with Scala’s own daughter playing the title role, while in the gardens the eminent scholar Pico della Mirandola delivered an oration on friendship before a similar gathering, which doubtless included Poliziano as well as Ficino.
Although the house has been considerably modified by subsequent renovations, there is ample evidence to illustrate Scala’s domestic setting. Excerpts from a banking account with the Rinieri listing his early household purchases in 1459–64 – furniture, bedding, pots and pans as well as clothes and books – was jointly published by Alison Brown and Albinia della Mare in 1976, while a later, mostly building, account book for the 1470s was published by Vanna Arrighi in a book, La Casa del Cancelliere (Florence, 1998). This book, as well as Alison Brown's biography and edition of Scala’s writings, and Linda Pellecchia’s 1989 article on the palace, provide full evidence about the palace and about Scala’s life.
The focus of the paper will however be on the use made of it as the setting for the active display of Renaissance culture. For despite all that has been written on Scala, this aspect of his life has not – to our knowledge – been the subject of public discussion, despite its relevance to the theme of Renaissance culture and the domestic interior. It will be Alison's argument that the house was emblematic of the new classicizing culture of which Scala, as a new man, was himself a leading exponent.
Alison Brown is Emerita Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Royal Holloway, University of London and contributes to the teaching of the M.A. 'Renaissance Decorative Arts and Culture, 1400–1650' at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art. She is currently a member of the publications committee of I Tatti Studies. Her publications include Bartolomeo Scala, 1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence (1979), and The Medici in Florence: the exercise and language of power (1992). She has edited a volume of Scala’s humanistic and political writings (1997) and a volume of conference papers, Language and Images of Renaissance Italy (1995). Recent essays include two studies of Lucretius in Renaissance Florence and an article on Lorenzo de Medici’s New Men, Renaissance Studies (2002). Forthcoming is a paper on Machiavelli’s philosophy and religion in The Companion Guide to Machiavelli, ed. J. Najemy.
Catherine Fletcher, ‘The “liberal port” of Gregorio Casali: Hospitality, Honour and Power in the Sixteenth-Century Diplomatic House’
Between 1525 and 1536 Gregorio Casali was a diplomatic agent at the court of Rome for the English crown. One of his roles was to provide accommodation and hospitality for the series of English special ambassadors who visited the papal court during Henry VIII's divorce negotiations.
Drawing on new research in the Italian archives, including that of the Casali family, this paper will consider the functioning of the Casali houses in Rome and Bologna as diplomatic spaces. It will discuss the role of the family as hosts to the visiting envoys and consider the complex and contradictory power relationships inherent in this provision of hospitality and domestic space.
In this early stage of resident diplomacy, the ambassador's house was an important place of work. Its role as a political space highlights the problem of differentiation between public and private in the domestic context. Yet this reflects broader characteristics of diplomatic practice, in which personal and family honour played a vital role.
Catherine Fletcher graduated from the University of Liverpool in Politics and Communication Studies in 1996. Having been extensively involved in political campaigning, in 1999 she joined the BBC's Political Unit, where she became a producer for the BBC Parliament channel. During that time she studied for an MA in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe at Royal Holloway, before returning to academic life full-time in 2004 to study for a Ph.D. Her current research, funded by the AHRC and supervised by Dr Sandra Cavallo, concerns English diplomatic practice at the papal court during the negotiations over Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon from 1527 to 1533, and deals in particular with the role of the Casali family in the English diplomatic service. Drawing on her experience of modern political environments, she is interested in the ways diplomacy was practised from day to day.
Peta Motture and Kirstin Kennedy, ‘The Object of Display: Art from the Home in the New Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A’
This two-part paper will explore the place of objects from the domestic interior in the V&A's new galleries of European Renaissance art, opening in November 2009. Peta Motture will outline some of the intellectual and practical issues underlying the display and interpretation of these objects in the new galleries, in which Italy is set within the wider European context. Kirstin Kennedy will present a research-in-progress case study, examining some of the lustred ceramics exported from Valencia that were a feature of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian domestic interiors. She will consider to what extent their decorative undersides and backs were of particular functional or aesthetic importance to their Italian patrons.
Peta Motture is currently Chief Curator of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, opening at the V&A Museum in November 2009. She has published widely on medieval and later sculpture and was co-curator of the exhibitions Earth and Fire (Houston and London, 2001–2) and Depth of Field (Leeds, 2004–5).
Kirstin Kennedy joined the V&A in 2003 as research fellow and curator of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries Project. Previously she held the post of British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies at King's College, London. She has published on thirteenth-century Castilian manuscripts and fifteenth-century Spanish poetry.
Jim Bennett, ‘Mathematics at Home: Personal Astronomical Instruments in the Renaissance’
The term 'mathematical instrument' referred to a much broader range of objects in the Renaissance than it does today. A significant number represent aspects of some 'professional' practice, such as surveying, architecture, gunnery or navigation, but the majority of surviving instruments did not belong to mathematical practitioners and would have been used in everyday life. Portable sundials are probably the most common of these, though other instruments that depend on some knowledge of astronomy also survive in numbers. This paper examines these instruments, both the group and some individual examples, for their value as records of Renaissance life.
Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. His research has mainly concerned the physical and mathematical sciences, and has involved instruments and museums whenever possible. He has been working for some time on a catalogue of the instruments for practical geometry in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
Jeremy Warren, ‘The Collecting and Display of Bronzes in Renaissance Italy’
Jeremy Warren will discuss the collecting of bronzes and other sculpture and their possible display in the Renaissance home. The core of his talk will be a case study focusing on one individual, the gentleman and amateur scholar Gaspare Fantuzzi (c.1465/70–1536), a member of one of the leading Bolognese families of the time. An associate of the historian Leandro Alberti and the humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio, Fantuzzi commissioned a remarkable bronze figure of the Drunken Hercules exhibited in the A Casa show, as well as two marble reliefs, probably commissioned from Antonio Lombardo. The three sculptures, documented to Fantuzzi through inscriptions on their reverse, may be regarded as one of the most precious and remarkable surviving groups of small sculptures associable with a single non-princely patron in the Italian Renaissance.
Jeremy Warren is Assistant Director and Head of Collections at the Wallace Collection. He is a specialist in Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts and is currently completing the catalogue of medieval and early Renaissance sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has written on sculpture in Bologna and Padua and most recently on the forging of Renaissance sculpture in nineteenth-century Florence. He has also written extensively on the collecting of Renaissance decorative arts, especially in the nineteenth century.
Charlotte Hubbard and Sofia Marques, ‘Technical Observations of some Early Architectural Decorative Elements by Luca della Robbia’
The glazed terracotta roundels depicting the labours of the months are known as early works by Luca della Robbia (first half of the fifteenth century). They were made to decorate the ceiling of Piero di Cosimo di Medici’s study. The so-called ‘roundels’ are in fact roughly square-shaped and are an uncommon type of object, due to their ceiling decoration, their scale and the use of glaze for the painted scenes. Their construction must have been the result of a prestigious contract that would have required great skill and investment to overcome technological limitations on the part of the maker. The subsequent damage caused to the glazed corners of the roundels during their removal from the study and their use in different situations presents a challenge for the understanding of their original setting and also for interpreting their redisplay. Observations made during their conservation treatment, in preparation for the Renaissance Home exhibition, bring insight to the technology of their construction and support the resolution of display issues.
Charlotte Hubbard joined the Sculpture section of the Conservation Department at the V&A Museum in 1992, and became Head of Sculpture Conservation in 2002. Her area of interest is terracotta, although her work has included a wide range of preventive and interventive conservation on European and Asian objects in a variety of materials. Other activities include advising curators, peers and the public on conservation-related matters, the development of surveys and contributions to other V&A projects.
In her current role as Conservation liaison she is responsible for giving technical advice on the new Sculpture Galleries Project and for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries Project. The role includes advising curators, Project Team, designers and engineers on both sculpture-specific and wider conservation issues such as environment, lighting and display. The work also includes planning for the reinstallation of all the objects, amongst which are a large number of monuments and large architectural elements.
Sofia Marques was first trained by a private restorer in Porto, Portugal, while she was doing a degree in History/Art History at the Universidade de Letras do Porto, Portugal. She then came to England to pursue further studies in conservation and graduated from the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2000. She first worked as a freelancer on different projects in England and abroad, then worked on an eighteen-month contract for the British Museum on the King’s Library project. She joined the Sculpture Conservation Studio of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2003.
Her main responsibilities since have been to undertake preventive and interventive conservation of the Sculpture Collection with the aim of maintaining and improving their stability, to document treatments and investigate the technology of objects and share knowledge with the general public and other professionals. She also takes part in the preparation of exhibitions and loans.
She has so far been involved with the opening of four new galleries.
Charles Hope, ‘Titian’s Paintings of Venus with a Mirror’
Charles Hope will talk about Titian's paintings of Venus with a Mirror. One of
the best of these paintings, which has very seldom been exhibited previously, will be shown in the exhibition. In his paper, he will consider how and when the various versions of the subject, some of which are now known only through copies, were produced and how much Titian himself contributed to them.
Charles Hope is Director of the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is an art historian, specialising in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with a particular interest in Titian, on whom he has published extensively. He has worked at the Warburg Institute since 1976.
Valerie Taylor, ‘Drawings for Dining: Themes and Variations in Renaissance Tableware Design’